Outside every house in Finland stands a large wooden ladder, tall enough to reach to the top of the roof, for fire is very common, and generally ends in everything being demolished by the flames. Buckets of water, passed on by hand, can do little to avert disaster, when the old wooden home is dry as tinder and often rotten to the core.
Again our attention was arrested as we jogged along by the earth mounds; those queer green mounds that look like graves in a country church-yard, which are so common in Iceland, where they grow so close together, there is often hardly room for a pony's feet to pass between, but on the origin of which scientists disagree. The grass-grown sand—sand as beautiful and silvery as the sand of Iona, but here was no sea, although it had left its deposits in ages long gone by—was beautifully fresh and green.
Iceland moss, too, grows in profusion—a very useful commodity for the peasants, who plug out the draughts between the wooden walls of their houses with it, or make it into a kind of medicinal drink, as the Buckinghamshire peasant makes her nettle tea from the wondrous stinging nettles that grow five feet high in some of the lovely lanes of wooded Bucks.
Iceland moss, indeed, has taken the place of bread in times of famine, for that or the bark of the pine tree has been ground down many times into flour and mixed with a little rye for the half-starved peasants' only sustenance.
With all their sufferings and their hardships, can one be surprised that they take life seriously?
That evening at ten o'clock—but it might have been seven judging by the brilliancy of the sunset—we rowed on the lake, accompanied by a grandson of Finland's greatest poet, Runeberg.
It really was a wonderful night; we English have no idea of the gorgeousness of long July sunsets in Finland, just as we little dream of the heat of the day, or the length and beauty of the evenings. It is in these wondrous sunny glows, which spread themselves like a mantle, that the hundreds of miles of lakes and thousands and thousands of islands look their best. And there are many such evenings. Evenings when one feels at peace with all the world, and one's thoughts soar higher than the busy turmoil of the crowded city.
It is these wonderful nights that impress the stranger most of all in Finland. There is something to make even the most prosaic feel poetical. There is a dull dreariness, a sombre sadness in the scene, and at the same time a rich warmth of colouring, a strength of Nature that makes even the least artistic feel the wonders of the picture spread out before them, and, withal, a peacefulness, for these vast tracts of uninhabited land mean repose. Those numerous pine forests, denoting quiet, and the wide, wide canopy of Heaven, unbroken by mountain or hill, give one an idea of vast extent and wild expanse.
Finland is reposeful; and has a charm about it which is particularly its own.
It was on such an evening as this that we rowed over the wide deep waters of Maaninka, as still as a mirror, to the little white church, with its tower soaring out of the pines, on the other side. We had been joined by several new friends, all anxious to show us their church; but, individually, our happiness was a little spoilt by the fact that the boat was leaking badly, and we could positively see the water rising in her bottom. Up—up—up—the water crept.